Nationalisme,
Revolution & Independence
The Dutch conquest in the development of
a common education and administrative system throughout Sumatra. Together with
Islam, this laid the foundation for the emergence of common national sentiment.
This first made itself felt through the mass Muslim organization Sarekat Islam,
which tapped the suppressed resentment at alien domination. Jambi witnessed a
small rebellion in 1916. Aceh was disturbed by riots in 1918-1919, and the
Minangkabau developed a radical Islamic movement in the same years. In 1926,
the Indonesian Communist Party launched a quixotic revolution; paradoxically,
it was some of the relatively commercialized Muslim of Minangkabau who fought
hardest for it.
In 1917 the first generation of
Sumatrans to have enjoyed Dutch education formed the Young Sumatrans League.
Support came from Minangkabau clerks, teachers and traders all over Sumatra.
Toba Batak students established their own organization in the 1920s, and by
1926 these groups had been incorporated into the National League of Indonesian
Students. Sumatran figures such as Mohammad Hatta (later Vice-President) and Soetan
Sjahrir (Indonesian’s first prime minister) contributed greatly to developing
Indonesian’s national consciousness.
Sumatra’s role in developing a
national literature was even more important. Malay had always been the
principal written language for most Sumatra’s, and its adoption as Bahasa
Indonesia, the language of nationalism, involved no linguistic conflict as it
did for Javanese and Sundanese. Hence the first writers to adopt Malay to
modern literary uses were virtually all Sumatran. In the early twenties, the
political activists Mohammad Yamin, Sanisui Pane, and Mohammad Hatta were the
first to write Malay poetry in a modern spirit, while the Langkat prince Amir
Hamzah and the revolutionary Chairil Anwar wrote the finest Indonesian poetry
of the 1930s and 1940s. The development of the modern Indonesian novel in the
1920s and 1930s was almost entirely a Minangkabau affair.
It is not surprising, considering
this strong contribution to Indonesian nationalism, that Sumatra rejected all
attempts to separate it from Java in the turbulent 1940s.TheJapanese invasion
in March 1942 caused greater upheaval than in Java. In Aceh the Japanese were
assisted by an armed rebellion against the retreating Dutch, whose leaders
wanted to end the dominance of the uleebalang
(district chiefs). The Japanese initially suppressed all these movements, and
forbade any nationalist activity. However, the Japanese gave the nationalists
access to the state-population for war purposes. When the war ended, two rival
elites-nationalist and traditionalist-eyed each other with mistrust.
The Japanese belatedly fostered the
idea of an independent Sumatra in 1945, establishing a powerless consultative
council and a secretariat in Bukittinggi. In 1947, the returning Dutch set up
federal states in the areasthey controlled in East Sumatra. The following year
they encouraged a Sumatran umbrella organization for these and other states,
but the idea gained little interest. Sumatrans had already decided in the 1920s
that they could only bring together their diverse ethnic groups at a national
level.
Independence was declared in Jakarta
three days after Hiroshima, but the revolution in Sumatra did not begin until
October, when allied troops arrived to accept the Japanese surrender. Young
activists, some with Japanese military training, fought against the British who
occupied parts of Medan, Padang, and Palembang, and finally against the Dutch
forces which replaced the British at the end of 1946.
Most of the violence was internal.
In Aceh the uleebalang were
overthrown by a Muslim led coalition in December 1945, at the conclusion of a
bloody civil war. Three months later, the east coast Malay sultans and
Simalungun rajas were overthrown in what was dubbed a “social revolution.”
These spontaneous movements led to a breakdown in central authority especially
in East Sumatra, where semi military groups ot young men, became a law unto
themselves funding themselves by selling the produce of the plantations they
controlled to Singapore merchants. When the Dutch occupied the plantation area
around Medan, and the oil installations of Palembang in mid-1947, these armed
groups fought among themselves in Tapanuli.
The vast island was far from
integrated politically or economically when the revolution ended with transfer
of full sovereighty to Indonesian in 1950. Each former residency had its own
battle-hardened military force reluctant to return to civilian life, and each
felt it had earned the right to play a part in the Republic on its own terms.
Moreover, the rewards of the smuggling trade to Singapore, which had seemed
patriotic during both the Japanese occupation and the revolution, were not easy
to give up to an impoverished central government in Jakarta which had little to
offer in return.
The first post-independence crisis
occurred in Aceh, when Muslims objected to being incorporated with Christian
Bataks into the province of North Sumatra, and to the failure of the government
to declare Indonesian a Muslim state. In 1953, Aceh revolted against Jakarta,
and declare Aceh part of Dar al-Islam (the Islamic world). Troops sent from
Java quickly re-occupied the Acehnese towns, but the hinterland remained
largely in rebel hands until peace was eventually negotiated in 1959. Aceh was
then granted autonomous status. Meanwhile Toba Batak and Minangkabau military
leaders joined national politicians dissatisfied with the centralism,
corruption and pro-communist policies of the central government, to form the
Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia (PRRI) in February 1958. The central government
reacted by bombing Padang and Bukittinggi and sending a large force from Java.
The fighting was over within six months, but it left West Sumatra feeling like
an occupied province in which locals were no longer trusted with high military
or civilian office. If Sumatrans had been over-represented in national
leadership before these events, they were under-represented thereafter.
Under President Suharto’s New Order
government which llook power in 1966, regional discontents have eased. Firstly,
the government’s anti communist and free-market policies are those which the PRRI had advocated. Secondly, the central government
has provided roads, electricity, schools, hospitals and other infrastructural
facilities, which have helped transform the economy. Large multi-ethnic
provinces were broken up until all except North Sumatra (pre-war East Sumatra
plus Tapanuli) were back to the boundaries of the old Dutch residencies, and
the army’s presence became less obvious. If one still hears grumbles about the pusat (center), these are now no
different from those heard in every Indonesian province.
